I’ve been using WordPress for my weblog for quite a while now and I find the ability to extend the basic functionality to be one of its greatest strengths. The developer community is amazing to say the least. I rely on a number of plugins to publish this weblog, but none more than Shorten2Ping by Samuel Aguilera.
Shorten2Ping allows me to use the excellent ping.fm, which allows me to post updates to all of my social networks, so when I publish a new weblog post Twitter, Facebook, and a couple of other spots are automagically updated for me. No fuss, no muss… until recently.
To get Shorten2Ping to work I have to provide an API key assigned by ping.fm. This is basically a handshake that allows Shorten2Ping to communicate with ping.fm on my behalf and publish my updates. (Yes, that’s an oversimplification, but you get what I mean.) About a week, or so, ago Shorten2Ping started receiving “Your API key has been suspended. Please contact us regarding this matter.” messages from ping.fm when I’d publish a post. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, turns out I wasn’t the only person with this problem. The author of Shorten2Ping got to the bottom of it. Ping.fm had a spam problem and disabled his developer key.
“The problem is that seesmic suspended it because they say that Shorten2Ping is used by spammers users.”
What to do?
All is not lost. Samuel patched up his plugin, and with any luck it’s going to work when I publish this page. If it doesn’t I’ll publish an update to this post, but hopefully it’ll work first time out.
There are a couple of things you’ll need to do after updating Shorten2Ping, it should show up in your WordPress Updates, so go install it.
First thing you’ll need to do is visit ping.fm and copy your posting e-mail address. Once you have that you’ll need to go to Plugins, locate Shorten2Ping and click on Settings link.
Next you’ll want to select Ping.fm email from the Send Notificaiton To combo-box.
Finally click on the Notification link and paste the e-mail address you copied from ping.fm and paste it into Posting email
Once you’ve done that you should be able to post using WordPress and once again update all your favorite social networks.
UPDATE: This fix requires more than the above steps to work. Apparently you’ll need support from your web host. The new Shorten2Ping “fix” requires the php mail() function. Apparently I don’t have that support enabled, and many folks probably don’t. I’d imagine it’s a security risk. Maybe we can convince Samuel to create Shorten2DlvrIt? Dlvr.it will also publish to your social networks just like ping.fm.
I’ve been using ping.fm for quite a while to update my social sites with links to my weblog posts, until recently that is. It looks like ping.fm is suffering from its popularity. The nasty spammers have discovered it and have messed it up for the rest of us. If, like me, you relied on Samuel Aguilera’s great WordPress plugin Shorten2Ping you’ve probably had trouble updating ping.fm, unless his recent e-mail fix worked for you. It didn’t work for me.